The Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) says through in­ter­na­tion­al part­ner­ship, it has be­gun trac­ing the source of the e-mail which sent bomb threats to over 50 pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools across the coun­try last Fri­day. It has iden­ti­fied that the serv­er used is based in Ger­many and the 're­solve host' of the email is sit­u­at­ed in Cyprus, a me­dia state­ment on Thurs­day af­ter­noon said.

"Ad­di­tion­al­ly, two Vir­tu­al Pri­vate Net­works (VPN), lo­cat­ed in Switzer­land and Pana­ma were used to fur­ther mask the iden­ti­ty of the ori­gin of the email," the TTPS state­ment read.

The TTPS un­der the su­per­vi­sion of DCP In­tel­li­gence and In­ves­ti­ga­tion Curt Si­mon, the Cy­ber Unit as well as the RAU made an as­sess­ment of the sit­u­a­tion, and con­clud­ed that the threats could be clas­si­fied as a cy­ber 'hoax".

The TTPS al­so says in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­di­cate that the email came from an anony­mous mail ser­vice provider. "Lo­cat­ing the anony­mous email ser­vice provider is key to this in­ves­ti­ga­tion. How­ev­er, this is a com­plex process and the anony­mous email and anony­mous email serv­er can re­main hid­den by uti­liz­ing a num­ber of Dark web tools," the TTPS said.

The TTPS says it will con­tin­ue to part­ner with in­ter­na­tion­al/cross bor­der cy­ber ex­perts who will work along­side our lo­cal ex­perts and tele­com providers as it in­ten­si­fies ef­forts to iden­ti­fy the source of the email threats.

Last Fri­day, over 50 pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools through­out the coun­try re­ceived a "bomb threat" via e-mail. Thor­ough search­es were con­duct­ed by bomb tech­ni­cians; how­ev­er, no ex­plo­sive de­vices were found.